After wondering about whether hoodia does really work, the next question probably would be, how does it work? The way it worked for years in Africa with the bushmen was that when they had to travel in the desert, they ate it and it suppressed both their hunger and their thirst. For them, this was a necessity in the hot and arid desert. It would have meant the difference between life and death for some.
So how does this process of suppressing the appetites work? This should really have been a matter of extensive research but for some reason, hoodia gordonii has not undergone anything more than very superficial studies and no sustained clinical trials. In the absence of that, it is left to observers to try and figure out how it could possible work. The main consensus seems to be that hoodia works in the brain by turning off the trigger that tells the person when the stomach feels that it needs food. This would be in response to the trigger that the stomach sends the brain when it is empty or it could be a trigger that a craving within the person sends in order to be fulfilled. So the triggers could come from the stomach for sustenance or from the brain itself as a result of a psychological aberration. If this process is short circuited, then the person does not get a signal that he is hungry and does not rush out to proceed to stuff his mouth.
Is this a healthy trend? Most of us eat far more than we need. Our bodies don’t just get enough, they get an excess of food and drink. This is turn puts a tremendous pressure on all our organs to process this food and keep the amount of nutrients we need and expel the rest. Why should our bodies be overworked to just shovel out so much of the food which we don’t really need? If we ate less and ate more wisely, our bodies would work at their optimum and there would be a balance in our system. What hoodia does is to reorient our minds to stay off food and maybe then we can retrain our minds to say STOP when our stomachs have had enough.
If hoodia tests as safe for use, then it might just be a great oral prescription drug that can be taken by people who have a genuine weight problem. Today so many of them are going under the knife in order to get rid of the extra flash. How much easier it would be if they could do it with a hoodia diet.